A few weeks ago the president of Tajikistan has done the same and changed Emomali Sharipovich Rahmonov to Emomalii Rahmon. He was much more decided about it – he just announced that he’s changing his name and after a couple of days ordered that newborn babies’ last names will be registered without Russian endings.

Notice the the double i in the end of his first name. In the Tajik language, which is a variant of Persian, an -i is added to the end of the word to express its belonging to the next word. So Emomalii Rahmon means “Rahmon’s Emomali”. The Russian ending -ov (or -yev), common in last names in Russia and especially ubiquitous in Soviet Muslim territories means quite the same: Rahmonov = Rahmon’s, Kadyrov = Kadyr’s, Ivanov = Ivan’s etc. Emomali wanted to cut Tajikistan from the Russian heritage but in the same time to remain consistent with the meaning of the Russian last name. He explained that this way he honors his father Rahmon, after whom he received the last name. See also the discussion about Emomalii on Wikipedia.

I didn’t know about the double ‘i’ at the end of the President of Tajikistan’s first name. But, it strikes me as especially strange that he want’s his name to be spelled and pronounced Emomali-i. As far as I know, this is not a traditional Tajik or Persian way of expressing “child of”. The tradional Persian way is with the suffix -zade which literally means “struck from”. For example, I had an Iranian roommate whose last name was Bahadorzade, “child of Bahador”. A prince or princess is a Shahzade, “child of the king”. So why didn’t Rahmonov change his surname name to Rahmanzade?

By the way, I scanned the Wikipedia discussion and couldn’t find any reference to a news source that actually quotes the president of Tajikistan as explaining that the double ‘i’ meant “son of”. Can someone provide a source?